Efficient Sealed-Bid Auction Protocols Using Verifiable Secret Sharing

This article proposes efficient solutions for the construction of sealed-bid second-price and combinatorial auction protocols in an active adversary setting. The main reason for constructing secure auction protocols is that the losing bids can be used in the future auctions as well as negotiations if they are not kept private. Our motivation is to apply verifiable secret sharing in order to construct various kinds of sealed-bid auctions. We initially propose two secure second-price auction protocols with different masking methods. Subsequently, we provide two secure combinatorial auction protocols based on our second masking approach. In the first scheme, we apply an existing dynamic programming method. In the second protocol, we use inter-agent negotiation as an approximate solution in the multiple traveling salesman problem to determine auction outcomes. It is worth mentioning that our protocols are independent of the secret sharing scheme that is being used.